How To Make a Website | No Coding Required | Cheap and Effective Way

If you are planning to make a website for your own and don’t have much knowledge of coding and all, then you have come to right place. This guide will help you to make a website in just few minutes and believe me :

You don’t have to be an IT geek to build a website from scratch

You don’t need to have a lot of money. Its actually cheaper to start a website than buying a pair of shoes for yourself.

Why Would You Love This Website Setup Guide

This guide is different from others as its short and accurate. Rather than telling stories on CMS and other things, this guides focuses on fast setup of your website.The guide is platform specific i.e. WordPress. CMS i.e. Content management system is a user-friendly platform for building websites and managing your own online content, instead of using a bunch of loose HTML pages. WordPress is one of those CMS options available in the market. Being the easiest and efficient option available, 75% of overall websites on internet are made on wordpress. So, Web supports recommends wordpress for beginners.

2 Steps Towards Website Setup

#1 Choosing The Right Domain Name and Hosting

Now, as you have decided of the CMS platform that you are making your website on, the next step in our process involves choosing a domain name and hosting. A domain name is basically the URL one types into a browser’s address bar to visit a particular website and hosting is the storage space on internet where your website’s data will be saved. Hosting is the breath of your website. one bad decision of hosting may lead your website to fall.

There are hundreds of hosting service providers (like BlueHost, SiteGround, Hostgator, Dreamhost etc) available on the internet, but i always choose and recommend Hostgator over all. Reason being, its cheaper and reliable at the same time, but you choose any good hosts as you like. Talking of the hosting type, You really have two options when it comes to hosting types recommended for WordPress newbies.

Shared Hosting

Managed WordPress Hosting

I recommend shared hosting plan, being the cheapest, for first time webmasters/beginners. As you can always move to better hosting types and plans at later stage once your website start getting traffic.

Here’s the list of shared hosting plan available on Hostgator, websupports recommends baby plan over others, because of advantage of unlimited domains installation and you don’t need business plan untill thousand are hitting your website. Also, you may choose the tenure ranging from monthly, quarterly, half yearly, yearly and even more than that.

Once you have made the choice of plan and proceed with buy now, hostgator will ask for a domain as below

You can buy a domain name on hostgator, but i usually choose to and recommend to buy it on Godaddy and not by your hosting provider.

Just search on google- Godaddy, open the website and search on the check domain bar to check the availability of domain. If available, you can proceed with it and if not, make some changes to fit your need. You may have to choose the tenure period while booking domain too, choose it as per your pocket as you can always renew it.

But, getting the right domain name is crucial which should be short, memorable, catchy and easy to type.

As an easy starting point:

If you’re making a website for your business, your domain name should match your company name. For example: YourCompanyName.com

If you’re planning to set up a website for yourself, then YourName.com can be a great option.

For this site (WebSupports), I choosed websupports.in

Domain names usually end with .com, .org, .in or .net, but in recent months, a huge amount of domain extensions have come out, ranging from .agency to .pizza. But, Avoid the weird extensions and go with .com, .net, .in or .org unless they perfectly describe what you have to offer – and even then, see if you can find a more common name.

So, if you have already bought the domain name on godaddy, click yes in the above popup, enter the domain name you are having and proceed. If not buying on godadddy, search for the domain availability in Hostgator only and proceed toward the steps till the payment is made.

Once payment made, you will receive a confirmation mail on your registered mail id, along with the link to your Cpanel with login credentials. Login in to your Cpanel which will look like this

It’s time to install wordpress on your domain name. Open Softaculous app installer in software section, click on worpress among all the CMS and click install now. The following setup form will open.

Leave protocol as http://

Choose the domain from the drop-down on which wordpress is to be installed. (which should be the domain name under which web hosting is bought)

Leave in directory as blank , as you would not want your website link to be like youname.com/something

Site name should be the name of your website (generally domain name) . Also, add description to it.

Enter Admin username and admin password, which will be the credentials to your wordpress website back-end.

Click install.

Once installation completes. Open yourwebsitedomain.com/wp-admin , which will lead to login page to your website back-end. If you have bought your domain from provider other than your hosting provider (which i recommend too) , an error page will load saying ‘You’ve registered your domain. Now put it to work.’

This is because, you will have to replace the default Nameservers set on your domain with the one’s that you have received in your mail while hosting booking confirmation.

Sign in to your Godaddy account and open My products. Click on DNS in front of domain name to set it as custom.

Open the confirmation mail by Hostgator that you received while booking a hosting plan, and copy the nameserver1 and nameserver2 from the mail and paste it in place of nameservers under DNS details opened in Godaddy.

It take sometimes upto 2-3 hrs for the update of name servers in Godaddy. Once nameservers updated on godaddy, open yourwebsitedomain.com/wp-admin and login with the credentials you set while installation of wordpress.

Congratulations , you have already entered the back-end of your website and your website is already live on the internet. Now, its time to customize your website including the theme, pages. post etc.

Customizing your site’s Appearance and activating a WordPress Theme

Open Appearances > Themes. And click on the “Add New” button on the top. And choose from one of the themes displayed or search for a specific theme if you have any in mind.

Click install on the theme you want to add to your website and activate it once installed.

The next part involves customization of a theme. You can access this under from Appearance > Customize. You can do a number of things to your site’s appearance from here. But that’s not the crux of this post, a theme is sufficient to start a website.

Create pages (Pages>Add New)

Pages on a website help divide your website into a requisite number of pieces to present the different sections of your site’s content. Pages are more than posts and are used for specific purposes on your site. You can create pages specifically to cater to the requirements of a About us,Contact Us or perhaps create landing page.

Open pages>add new. A new screen will open asking for page name and content. Eg. if you want to create a about us page giving the brief of your self. In the top bar , fill in the page name and in the content box, add the information or data that you want to add in the page. You may add photos by clicking on add media and then browsing a photo from your desktop. Click publish once complete.

Add Plugins (Plugins>Add New)

Plugins are a scripts or pieces of code written to perform a very specific function or set of functions on your website. Thus, saving your need to learn code for different functions.

A simple example would be adding a contact form or any kind of form plugin, it helps people to contact you. For adding contact form plugin, open plugins>add new and search in the search plugin bar for contact form.Choose the plugin you want to installed as per their ratings. Click install now.

Once installed, click activate. Now , the plugin name will start showing in installed plugin page.

We installed WPforms plugin. Open WPforms>Add new via new tab WP form appeared in left side menu. Select and create sample contact form in which you can do the customization. Once done, click save and copy the shortcode by clicking on embed.

Now, open Pages>add new, You can keep the name as Contact us and in the contect/body section paste the short code. Publish the page.

Menus (Appearances > Menu)

Menus are an extremely important for any website. They offer a means to navigate your site and its content. After all, what’s the point in creating captivating content if your visitor can not find it easily on your site. Bad menus and navigation can lead to a high bounce rate (the number of visitors as a percentage who leave your site after just viewing just one page).

You may have seen websites with menus on the top or the side and even at the bottom. We can do all of this.

You’d like to include pages like “About”, “Blog”, “Contact” and “Our Services” as part of your primary menu. Any page you’d like displayed on your menu can be added. The number of menus and their placement on your site depends on your WordPress theme.

To create a menu-

Open appearance>menus

Type the menu name (which would be just for your reference) and click create menu.

Select things to be added in menu from options at left side . You may add pages, post, categories and custom links to the menu.Click save.

Open Appearance>customize, scroll and open menus and assign a location to menu.